1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a field of network for testing and measuring telecommunication networks. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a measurement of action-capture network components and a deferral and aggregation thereof for a network test configuration.
2. Description of the Related Art
In testing and measurement of network environments, such as telecommunications environments, carriers or wireless companies execute tests and capture and deliver measurements of the tests to a database, which is later used to analyze the network. Tests that may be performed, for instance, are service assurance tests. Moreover, multi-protocol applications are becoming popular with wireless mobile device (e.g., cell phone) users. Some examples of these multi-protocol applications are e-mail to short messages and vice versa, web HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), to short messages, and others.
The multi-protocol applications have two common characteristics: (1) The multi-protocol applications use a combination of wireless, Internet and telephony protocols to complete an application transaction. Such protocols include SMS (short message service), WAP (wireless application protocol), HTTP, and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol); and (2) some parts of the multi-protocol applications are connection-based; that is, the multi-protocol applications establish and maintain a connection to a server or service to support data upload/download, while other parts of the multi-protocol applications are connectionless; that is, the multi-protocol applications use a best-effort-only message delivery system Traditional tests for these types of multi-protocol applications are self-contained tests of the component protocols, which yields a fragmented status of the multi-protocol applications. The self-contained tests are tests where measurements are taken or captured of components of the wireless, Internet, and the telephony protocols included in a particular multi-protocol application and those measurements are delivered to the carrier.
However, not all the measurements of the components of the Internet and the telephony protocols are needed to generate meaningful measurements of the multi-protocol application. Accordingly, the carrier must further process the measurements to generate meaningful measurements pertaining to the particular multi-protocol application. Specifically, the carrier must select and extract specific measurements of components that were taken of the wireless, Internet and the telephony protocols that are necessary to provide meaningful measurements of the multi-protocol application.
A system and method are needed that would break down the capture and the delivery of the measurements so that meaningful measurements are obtained pertaining to a multi-protocol protocol. Further, a system and method are needed that provide more flexibility in accommodating different types of protocols and in how a test can aggregate information from multiple protocols to produce meaningful measurements of the multi-protocol protocol.
Thus, a system and method are necessary that would re-structure or take a model of an existing protocol test and break the test into pieces and re-organize those pieces to generate therefrom meaningful test results. A system and method are necessary that can quickly be built using various combinations of components that correspond to different types of protocols.